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Working memory and inferences: Evidence from eye fixations during reading.

Manuel G. Calvo1

  • 1University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.

Memory (Hove, England)
|December 19, 2001
PubMed
Summary

Working memory capacity, measured by the reading span task, influences how readers make inferences. Higher working memory aids in understanding predictable events during reading comprehension.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Individual differences in working memory capacity impact cognitive processes.
  • Reading comprehension involves inferential reasoning to understand text meaning.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between working memory capacity and the ability to make inferences about predictable events during reading.
  • To determine if working memory affects early lexical access or later text integration processes.

Main Methods:

  • Monitoring eye fixations during reading to measure gaze durations and regressions.
  • Presenting context sentences that either predicted or did not predict subsequent events.
  • Using the reading span task to assess individual working memory capacity.

Main Results:

  • Higher working memory capacity correlated with shorter gaze durations across sentence regions.
  • An interaction revealed that high-span readers, unlike low-span readers, showed facilitated reanalysis of inferential sentences.
  • This facilitation was evidenced by reduced regression-path reading times in later sentence regions for high-span readers.

Conclusions:

  • Working memory capacity plays a crucial role in facilitating elaborative inferences during reading.
  • This facilitation appears to occur during late text-integration processes, not early lexical access.
  • Individual differences in working memory significantly influence reading comprehension strategies.

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